Greetings and salutations all,
In this week of production, the team began putting pencil to paper metaphorically. Our team was focused on white boxing and getting ready for modeling to begin in earnest, and my job was to create a prototype of the yellow wiring texture that our machinery and ship is gonna have.
For some context, these really quick sketches here show somewhat the aesthetic that we were interested in.

My plan to execute this aesthetic consisted of this: create an animated alpha channel that controls the value of both emission and subsurface, so that the surface material could remain independent of the inside wires.
Here is the result from the first round of testing:

Speaking to the things that worked and didn't work. The animated texture with pulses traveling around the pattern was a very nice aesthetic. The alpha mask worked in Maya as an animated texture without issue. And overall, it has a very futuristic vibe. However, the surface fails to look like the wiring is underneath the surface. Visually, despite the use of subsurface scattering, the veins look like a decal that sits on top. Now, part of it might be a result of the extremely hard border lines, an easy fix with a blur node in Nuke. However, given some limitations with Arnold, and the eventual goal to import this into Unreal Engine 5, a different approach will be needed.
Subsurface scattering works differently in Unreal Engine, and might not yield the results we intend. Therefore, the next step to try is a combination of geometry layers to create the intended effect. We can use the same animated alpha on a piece of geometry, and place that directly under another semi-translucent material so that the lines glow through the "cover". This should undoubtedly give the effect of sitting under the surface, and allows for a simpler emission map in Arnold and Unreal. This coming week, I will be testing this aesthetic and experimenting with animated textures in Unreal Engine. Looking forward to sharing an update on this process next week!
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